ONCE UPON A TIME.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 71, 26 March 1910, Page 13

ONCE UPON A TIME.

WHEN LAWYERS WERE BARRED FROM PARLIAMENT. If all the losrncd leaders who are now inciting eleotors in different parts of the country to send them to tho House of Commons suooeed in capturing seats, there will (wrote tho London Telegraph of 18th January) be aomo forty-one K.C. M.P.'s in the near future. Of the candidates, sixteen aro of the Liberal faith and twenty-fivo of tho other sohool of political thoaght. Once upon a time there was a deep<aeated belief— now happily dissipated— that barristers had only their own professional interests in view when they wooed constituencies, and tho result was tho Parliamentary Ordinance of 1372 disqualifying practising lawyers from sitting as Knights of tho shire. "No man of law," it ran, "following business in the King's Court is to be returned or accepted as a member." This, however, failed of its purpose, and King Henry IV., who took the matter into his hands in 1404, exoluded lawyers by writ from what was acoordinjrly known as the "Unlearned" Parliament. "But tile King's writ, like the Parliamentary Ordinance, had little effect. Tha lawyers, ejected though they were in tho early part of tho fifteenth century, had found thoir way back to Parliament in large numbers when Queen Elizabeth was on tho throno, and the journals of the House of Commons during her roign contain many orders directing tho Sorgeant-at-Arms to summon absent barrister members. But the lawyers' troubles wero not over. King James I. disliked thorn much, and on tho ovo of tho Parliamentary election of 1624-25 desired tho constituonoios, in a proclamation, "not to chooso curious and wrangling lawyers who may seek reputation by stirring needless questions." Whatever may have been the immediato eftoct of the Royal advice, it had passed off in 1640, for it was then proposed in tho House of Commons that the judges bo moved to give preoedenoo in the motions to all such hiwyurs as aro members of this House.'" lnis kindly motion, however, was lost And that lawyers wore plentiful j n tho Parliament is dear, for in 1657 it was proposed in the House that the judges should bo required to sit at seven and n«e at ten o'clook in the morning for their convenience. This motion also was defeated. The popularity of tho barrister mambers did not become greater in the seventeenth and oighteenth centuries, but, they inoreased and multiplied nevorfchelo**. There were seventy -ono of them in tho first House eleoted after the Reform Act, and 131 of them in Queen Victoria's last Parliament. And they will aboundapart from tho above-inentioucd X.C.'s in tbe House now about to bo chosen.